Almost an open-source boot chain for Rockchip's RK3588

Desire and financial sustainability are not the same thing.

That is why there is a whole industry built around certification and NDA accessibility.

Manufacturers and designers will naturally optimise their products (for energy, flops, features, time to market and/or cost) in order to gain an edge over their competitors. Thier requires them to either patent, license, or otherwise obfuscate their designs.

This isn’t a conspiracy - going full open source is very rarely cost effective or commercially viable. A vast proportion of products and features would never have come to being in a world that was wholly funded by goodwill.

the pine product that shares this SoC (QuartzPro64) has to my knowledge not actually been released officially yet.

The closest would probably be the Quartz64 which uses the RK3566. The RK3566 is pretty well supported but it has some quirks since most products just use its big brother the RK3568 instead so most of the dev efforts come from that model instead.

The RK3588 is already used in a handful of pretty popular SBCs (such as the OrangePi5) so despite being newer and potentially having a bit less mature drivers in some areas, it is almost certainly getting way more development attention.

https://gitlab.collabora.com/hardware-enablement/rockchip-35... has some docs

Really it boils down to specific SoC and even specific device; it is futile to try to generalize too much. But Rockchip has seen steady progress in this front, and I'd assume older devices like rk3399 based ones especially would have pretty solid support.

Don't know about this specific piece of code yet, but I have had good results with one board (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/01/20/1800) and mixed results with another (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2024/02/10/2000).

I have another couple RK3588 and RK3588S boards that I just got and that look promising, but I haven't done all my tests yet.